Radiant Comics

Yesterday I made 42 new ink textures. I made them in a sketchbook that has 42 pages (I filled the front of all the pages). A 5.5 by 8 inch Strathmore Visual Journal sketchbook that had good thick 100 pound paper. I made textures last year and filled up the front and back pages of one of these sketchbooks so I aim to eventually fill the back side of the pages in this one too.

I had fun making these textures. It was a day when I was having a hard time getting anything creative done. I did a little bit of drawing and made a painted sketch card but didn’t have the ambition to get anything big started. Some days are like that. So I pulled out the empty sketchbook and decided to make ink textures.

I use these ink textures digitally. After I make them I scan them in as greyscale documents. After scanning I set them up so that I can use them both in Photoshop and Illustrator. Just scanning them really means that I can use them in Photoshop but to make them Illustrator ready I first have to turn them into Bitmapped files and then bring those files into Illustrator and auto trace them so they become vector files. I can usually do this fairly quickly as I use Actions (Macros) to automate as many of the steps as I can.

I started out making this batch of textures with stamps. Back in the 1990s I bought these stamps, the kind you press into a stamp pad to ink, that didn’t have an image on them but were just texture. One was a lot of little dots and the other was a denser grainy sort of texture. I also had two stamps of famous paintings. One was a Renoir and the other a Van Gogh.

Rather than use a stamp pad I took an old battered brush, dipped it in ink, and rubbed the brush all over the stamp. Then I pressed the stamp onto the paper and it left some ink texture behind. It takes about eight to ten stamps to fill the page but in reality I stamped the page many more times than that.

I was looking for different patterns in my in textures so depending on how much ink was on the stamp and how hard I pressed it would leave a different mark. So I took the time to make each page of textures distinct from the others. With the four different stamps I could make a lot of different textures.

Forty two pages of textures is a lot. So after making a bunch of them I got bored with the stamps and moved on to a big brush. I have an old and crappy bamboo brush that was perfect for this project. The bristles no longer form a point and are a couple of inches wide when the brush is dry. So I put a little bit of ink on my ink stone and mashed the brush into the ink. The result was a big wide brush with about twenty five tips to it.

I gently dragged the brush across the paper and it would make a whole bunch of parallel ink lines. Rough and uneven lines. Those are good for making texture. I even spun the brush around making circular spirals of texture. I had a good time working with that brush. Sometimes I’d drag it across and work with those jagged lines and sometimes I’d dab the brush on the paper and work with those small marks. It gave me a lot of options.

I also discovered a new tool for making good textures. A pot scrubber. Just last week I found a six pack of those flat green pot scrubbers that are used for doing dishes. They were in the pantry and had fallen down behind stuff. They caught my eye on that texture making day and I thought that maybe I could use them to make textures. And I could.

The scrubbers are around four by six inches and I cut off a piece about four by two inches. About a quarter to a third of the scrubber. It’s made of a stiff fibrous plastic that has a lot of air in it. I took my battered old brush and rubbed some ink onto the scrubber. It took a lot more ink to wet it than a solid stamp so I had to be careful with it and use a light touch or all the ink would come out of it at once and make a big black blob.

It turned out to be easy to work with a light touch. I could dab the scrubber and leave patterns of ink or I could draw it across the page and leave rough lines of ink. It turned out to be a very versatile tool for making ink patterns. I was able to do lots of pages with it.

It took a solid three or four hours of my Saturday to fill up the forty two pages with ink patterns. It was a pleasant afternoon though. I’m glad I was able to get something done. Some days when I want to be creative but don’t have it in me it’s good to do tasks like this. They’re not as creative as working on a drawing or painting but they are things that will help with drawings and paintings in the future. I’ve already incorporated the first book of textures that I made into a few digital prints. Textures make digital prints look a lot more interesting.

I could probably make digital textures fairly easily. I know how. It’s almost the same method as real ink textures. You pick a brush and make some digital marks with it. But I don’t find the digital textures nearly as interesting. It seems I have less control over them as I make them. I can get what I want easier with physical ink and paper.

In looking back at the book I think I like the textures made with the stamps best. The way they came out is pretty cool. I think I’m going to have to make more of them on the back side of these thick pages. But that’s for another day. Maybe even another day when the creative river isn’t flowing as swiftly as I want it to. We’ll see.

This week I decided that I wanted to turn as much of my art into prints as possible. It’s going to take months and months to do but I want some ready to go in case I need them. Some things are easy to turn into prints and I have plenty of things that are already prints. But still they all need to be set up properly at the same size.

Though I want to print them all out as 8.5×11 inches a lot of my stuff is at 11×17 inches. So my first step is, rather than shrink them down, I want to set them up at the larger size and then shrink them down. That way they’ll be set up at 11×17 inches just in case I ever need them to be.

Photoshop Actions make the process go a lot faster so it’s good to learn how to use them. They are also called macros and actions record what you are doing and then you can play back those steps on a new digital file.

One of the things I am making prints of are my “Covers to comic books that don’t exist” series. Specifically I’m starting with my “Dreams of Things” cover series in which I have finished 230 covers. That’s a lot of art to set up.

The way I make the “Dreams of Things” covers is to print out the logos and trade dress on a piece of Bristol board and then draw the cover with black India ink and color it with markers. I like the logos to be printed on the board with the art because I think that makes the original look cool. But that doesn’t make a print look cool.

When I scan in a finished “Dreams of Things” cover and then print it out the logo looks a little grey and fuzzy. The original looks fine but the print not so much. So my solution to this, that I figured out many years ago, is to replace the logo with a new clean digital version pasted right over the printed out and scanned in one. The logo replacement method works well but I only did that to a handful of covers back in the day. I have most of the 230 covers to do if I want them as prints.

The steps went like this. I have the logos set up in a template but I had to make the template a higher DPI. It was set up at 300 DPI for printing but the scans of the art are at 600 DPI. Rather than lower the DPI on the art I raised up the DPI on the logos. It’s always better to have more DPI than you need then to have less.

After the DPI was set I picked either the horizontal or vertical logo and copied it. Then I chose the document with the cover in it and pasted the logo in. I had to move it right over the fuzzy logo that was already there. It takes some fine tuning to get the new logo in the right place and cover the old logo perfectly.

I also ended up using a patch of white underneath the “Radiant Comics” logo. The part that has the rays of the sun. The points of those little triangles that make up the rays were fuzzy and weren’t getting covered up by the new logo very well. They’re really small and I didn’t know if anyone but me would ever notice but it was easy enough to cover them with a white patch and make myself feel better.

After the patch was in I had to set up an adjustment layer for the art itself. I wanted to adjust the “Curves” on the art. Since the file was a scan of a pice of paper I could see the color of the paper which was an off white. I wanted it to be white. So I turned the bottom 10% of color into pure white. I also wanted the black ink to be a little darker. It scanned in grayish. So I went into just the black channel and darkened that making the blacks 100% black.

The final step was to type the issue number and month over again since the scanned ones were especially fuzzy.

All of this took about ten minutes a cover. Not the longest time in the world but I had a lot of covers to do. So I decided to sit down and make an action to do as much of that as I could. It took about half an hour to get the action right but in the end it cut my time down to about three minutes a cover. That’s much better. Actions are so good at cutting down the time of repetitive tasks.

I still have a lot of other things I want to set up as prints. I set up one of my “Big Ink” drawings so far but I have a lot of them to go. Plus I’m not even sure if the scans for those are all ready. I had to scan those in four different pieces and I’m not sure if I assembled all those pieces into one file per drawing. I know I put some of them together but I think I have quite a few still to be assembled.

I also want to see if I can make prints out of my paintings. They are too big to scan in but in the past I’ve photographed them to make prints out of but it’s been a long time since I did anything like that. I think I took photos of my paintings as I finished them but it’s been a while and I can’t quite remember if I did. We’ll see.

I also have about one hundred 11×17 prints to make 8.5×11 prints out of. Those are mostly good to go but I still have to set them up in this format. I have a lot of work in front of me.

A collection of my cards.

In my younger days I often read the phrase, “He was a good artist but not good at business.” That made me think that I should make sure I was “Good at business.” It sounded like a good thing to be good at. It took me years to figure out that was a nonsense phrase.

Do you know who is “Good at business”? Business people are. Y’see business is a job. People do it full time. That’s all they do. They look for ways to buy and sell stuff and make money. They are not interested in some random artist unless they see a way to make money off that random artist. And even that is rare.

Business people do business full time. They can even be passionate about it. They might even have the advantage of having access to money. That’s a huge boost in business. There is no way that an artist, or anyone else, can compete in business with a person who does it as their job.

It took me a long time to learn that lesson. Being, “good at business” to me now means not bothering with opportunities in which the business person isn’t looking out for me. It means turning things down that offer me nothing but promises. There are a lot of offers to work for “Exposure” in the world of creatives. That’s business people looking for free work to make money off of. It’s a long shot that the creative will ever make any money.

I bring this up because of what I was doing yesterday. I was making some new “Business cards.” I put those words in quotes because although I made my first business cards in the early 1990s and have generally had some ever since I don’t think I’ve ever got any business through them. For me they are more social than business.

I was at the MoCCA Festival in March and the night before I realized I didn’t have any cards for what I wanted. All of the cards I have made up are for this very site. My webcomic and blog site. In recent years I’ve been sending people to my jaredosborn.com site because that has my social media and PDF link but I had no cards for that.

The lack of cards lead me to get the idea of putting a QR code to jaredosborn.com on my phones lock screen. That did the trick as anyone who wanted to exchange contact information could just scan my phone with their phone and go to my site.

That worked out pretty well and is also an example of what I mean by my use of business cards is more social than business. Over the years I have mostly used them to exchange contact information with other artists and creative people. I can’t think of any example of when business cards got me any business but I do find creative people to follow on social media with them.

That brings me to my new painted coats. At the beginning of last winter I painted on my new winter long coat, a duster, and then just last week I finished painting on a new spring short coat, a blazer. I wear them on my commute into NYC and on my walk from Penn Station down to 14th Street.

If you are going to wear coats with eye catching paintings on them then you had better be prepared for people to stop you in the street to compliment and talk about them. That’s okay with me because I expect it and don’t mind. It’s a nice change of pace from my normal commute where the social rule is that you’re not allowed to talk to any strangers.

So during my commute I got it in my head that I should have some cards to hand out to the people who compliment my coat. If they want to see more of my work then they can. I still have some cards with my blog/webcomic site (yeah, this one) but I wanted to have one with my list site on it. That one links to this one anyway. I guess jaredosborn.com is my master site these days.

For weeks I’ve been meaning to make those new cards but then I started on painting the short coat which took me a week, caught a cold which put me out of commission for two weeks, and then took another week to finish up the coat. The new cards were on the back burner for a while. Until this weekend.

I make the cards myself. They are the size of playing cards rather than business cards. That’s probably bad business but, as I wrote, I don’t get much business with them and I like that size. It’s a familiar size to people too.

I have some double sided inkjet paper so that I can have a back and front to the card. On the front I have a piece of my art and on the back I have the QR code, a design, and my name. All the backs are the same but the fronts each have a different piece of my art on them.

I have the digital files set up (nine cards to a 8.5×11 inch page) so that I can print all the backs, flip the paper over, and then print all the fronts. They line up fairly close to perfect. They’re no more than a sixteenth of an inch off from back to front. I can work with that. After printing them I laminate the cards and then cut them out by hand with an X-Acto knife and straight edge.

The cutting is the most time consuming part. I’ve tried doing it with a paper cutter but that way is not exact enough. Plus the lamination gives paper cutters trouble. It’s more exact to do it but hand with the razor but I have to really pay attention. Plus since the cards can be up to a sixteenth of an inch off I had to trim that small a slice off of about third of them. So sometimes instead of four cuts per card I have to make five. Even six on occasion. That adds up to more time and effort.

The final step is to use a corner rounder on them. Over the years I’ve had many different corner rounders but a few years ago I bought this big industrial looking one. It works better than all the small hand pressed ones I’ve had. It’s so effortless to use I wish I had more corners to round.

I went through the digital files of my work and set up twenty seven new pieces as cards. I also used nine cards I already had used in my old radiantcomics.com cards for a total of thirty six new cards. I printed them out, laminated them, cut them out, and rounded the corners. Then I decided I needed two of each and did that all over again.

Now I’m ready to wear my new short coat. I’ll keep some cards in the breast pocket and if anyone compliments my coat I can offer them one. It may not be business but it’s social.

I’m finally over a cold that was with me for about two weeks. From around the 20th of March to about the first of April I got no art made in those two weeks. I didn’t have the energy. Now I’ve got to get back to doing stuff and that’s not as easy as just feeling better. I have to build up momentum again.

Being self motivated to get art done is no easy task. In this world where we have no choice but to have a job and work for our money making art with no profit in it is not seen as a worthwhile way to spend your time. In order to be self motivated and overcome that takes a lot of effort and a bit of ego.

What this piece of writing is about is figuring out what I have to do to get back on track. I’ve already gotten a couple of things done, I inked a “Dreams of Things” cover and marker colored another one, but I still don’t feel back on track. I’m still a little bit lost in the tall grass.

I think that’s also because the cold hit just as I was a few days away from finishing painting a coat. I painted a new long winter coat back in November but then I decided to paint a new short coat for the Spring. A denim blazer. Painting coats takes a lot of work and is not a thing that I do normally so they interrupt the stuff I usually get done. I spent a solid week working on the coat right before the cold hit so it has really been about three weeks since I got any of my usual art done. That’s a long time.

So what is the stuff I want to get done? First off I have to finish that coat. I’ve worked on it another two days since my cold ended and I have at least one more day on it. All the hard stuff is done but I still have a few more decorative elements I want to put on it.

I think the biggest thing I want to get done is to finish my “Great Gatsby” illustrated book. I’ve been working on that for over two years and I think I’m close to finishing it. Right now I’m not 100% sure what I still need to get done on it. I have to look the whole thing over and see what details need to be taken care of. I know there is one illustration that I want to tweak part of and get it to my likings but the other illustrations are finished.

I also gave myself more work to do with the book since after I printed out the small first proof of it I decided that there should be a small black and white paperback version of it too. That means the whole thing has to be set up at the smaller size and the illustrations have to be changed to black and white. I think I’m going to have to dig up the inked versions of everything before they were all colored. I’m not exactly sure how I want the black and white version to look so that all has to be figured out. I think I can get that finished over the summer.

I had just started and gotten done a couple of prints in a new series that I started. “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” is the name of the series and I had it under way. I made two finished prints, a third under way, plus that was the one I was messing around making AI prints with too. I was just figuring out the direction I wanted it to go in but now I haven’t thought about it in weeks.

Of course I have to get my “Dreams of Things” drawings going again but I may be burning out on them anyway. I’ve gotten over 225 of them done in the series and I wonder how much longer I can work on it. That’s kind of why I started the “Last Night” series of prints but they really are a different thing. With “Dreams” I can do physical coloring with markers rather than computer coloring and I like that.

As I mentioned earlier I already got some “Dreams” pieces done but I wasn’t feeling them as I was working on them. Of course that could have been the cold lingering and I’ll feel better about doing them next week but I’ll have to see.

I started making some new “Message Tee” drawings for next year. Originally the idea for my Saturday comic was to make fifty two drawings of people in t-shirts and recycle them year after year with new messages on the shirts but over the years I’ve made a bunch of 52 sets of people. I haven’t drawn any new sets in a few years so this year I got it in my head to make some new drawings.

It started when I bought a new 9×11 inch sketchbook. I buy more sketchbooks than I can possible use and I like to try out different brands and sizes. After I got this one I thought that it would be a good one to draw Message Tee figures in. The last time I drew such figures they were in a smaller sketchbook so I thought it would be fun to use this bigger one. I got about twelve pencil drawings done in it before the cold hit so I have a lot more to go.

Of course the last thing I have to get going again is doing some writing. Though I have these blog pieces done weeks ahead of time and didn’t miss any weeks of posting I haven’t gotten any new ones written for the last two weeks. There was nothing I wanted to write about when I had that cold. So here I am getting started again. It feels pretty good.

Blazer Color Sketch

Back in the 1990s, when I was a younger man, I had a couple of coats that I wore that I had made paintings on. A long duster and a short denim jacket. Then time went by, the coats wore out, and for the last fifteen years or so I only wore plain coats. That was until last fall when I bought a new duster and painted it.

I’ve enjoyed wearing that painted duster this winter. I wear it mostly when I commute and it keeps me warm as I walk down to 14th Street on cold Manhattan mornings. I’ve enjoyed it so much that it inspired me to paint a new Spring coat too.

I still have my two old denim painted coats in a closet. At first I thought about pulling one of them out and repainting the coat. I would add new stuff to it. But I’m not as fond of denim jackets as I used to be so I decided to poke around online and see what else is out there. That’s how I ended up finding out that there is such a thing as a denim blazer.

I like suit coats, blazers, and sport coats. They have been what I’ve been wearing for the last 20 years. But they are very hard to paint on. About 15-20 years ago ( I painted more on it every year for a while) I painted on a zootsuit that I would wear to the Halloween parade in NYC. That suit fabric was not easy to paint on. I didn’t want to go through that again. That’s why I was happy to see a denim blazer. Denim is easier to paint on than whatever sport coats are usually made out of.

I ordered the coat and as I was waiting for it to arrive decided to work on a drawing for it. I had the photos of the coat, front and back, to use to set the proportions of the drawing. I went through my archive of scans of my thousands of drawings from over the years and used various drawings to make a composition for my jacket painting. That archive makes my life a lot easier when I’m working on something like this.

Then the coat came and guess what? The proportions of my drawing were off. The proportions of the actual coat were wider than the photo of it that I was using. So I went back to my archive, picked more images to work with, and redrew the composition. I went from four main figures/faces in the drawing to eight. It was a big change but I think I made it look even better. I had also done a digital color sketch for the painting so that had to be reworked too.

I already had a lot of fabric paint left over from the coat I painted at the beginning of the winter but I quickly noticed that I was running out of opaque white. I use that white as a ground so it goes quickly. The denim of the coat is black so anywhere that I’m going to paint has to have an opaque white coat of paint applied first. This meant the whole back of the coat as well as some smaller parts on the front. I quickly ordered some more opaque white.

The coat took a long time to paint. Day One: I worked on the drawing and color sketch. Day Two: I reworked the drawing and color sketch and primed the back of the coat with white. Day Three: I transferred the drawing to the back of the coat and painted the drawing in black line. Day Four: I painted on the base color of the painting. Days Five through Seven: I worked on finished the painting on the back of the coat. Day Eight: I painted small stuff on the front of the coat. Each of these days was at least eight hours of work. A couple of them were ten hours because I want to keep going and get it done. It’s a lot of work to paint on fabric that isn’t stretched and taut.

Blazer Drawing

I still have some more to go on this coat. There are just a couple of simple things I want to do on the front of it that I haven’t gotten done yet. Just a couple of blue stripes and maybe a small face on the top front pocket. I already painted art wasps on the two bottom pockets.

I also want to paint a couple of figures on the sleeves but that might take some doing. I have the drawings picked out but I have yet to do color sketches for them. Plus I have to figure out exactly where they are going on the sleeves. I’ve done such sleeve painting on my old denim jackets and they are in the tradition of pin-up tattoos on a sailor’s arm. I’ll get to that eventually but I might need a break first. It has been a lot of work to paint the back of the jacket. The painting is around 16×28 inches.

The main reason I painted the long coat earlier this winter was because I got tired of wearing a boring coat all winter. I just couldn’t take it any more. With my interesting coat people even occasionally talk to me about it on my commute. I find that nice.

On the warmer days of the winter when I wore a boring short coat I began to feel a little disappointed that I didn’t have any cool paintings on my coat. I’d look down at my coat and sigh. This new coat won’t even replace that boring short coat because, as a blazer, it’s really a coat for mild days. I think I’m going to have to plan to do something with that short winter coat for next year but I’m not sure what. It’s not denim or canvas like my duster. I’ll have to think about it.